The following is an infographic created that provides some interesting and startling facts:

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

 
If you’ve got a computer-based job like me, what do you do about this? There are two main things I’d recommend:

1. Swopper Stool
I’ve used a Swopper Stool on and off over the years, and we currently have two of these being used in my house now. They are a fantastic way to stay active while you’re sitting. You can bounce on the chair, move forward and back, side to side, and keep your body moving and more active. It also promotes good posture.

Many people use one of the inflatable ball chairs for the same purpose. While they provide some of the same benefits, they are definitely not as sturdy, well-made, as comfortable, or as stylish as the Swopper.

The Swopper isn’t cheap, but it’s a really high quality made chair/stool that has a great warranty and I’ve never had any problems with ours. There are lots of colors available and the price is different depending on what type of fabric (or leather) you get on the seat.

2. Standing Desk Option
If we can’t sit all day, why not stand most or part of the time? A company called ErgoTron makes a bunch of different devices in their WorkFit line that securely clamp to normal desks that allow to easily move from sitting to standing. You simply raise and lower your keyboard/mouse and monitor(s) when you want to stand. One of our GuideMe team members has one, and I’m planning on ordering one now as well. He reports that his back feels so much better at the end of each day than it did when he sat all day.

The Swopper combined with a standing desk option like the ErgoTron WorkFit should really fight against the problems associated with sitting all day. While some people may balk at the money involved in creating a setup like this, how much is your health worth to you?

Besides your actual work setup, here are some other tips:

• When talking on the phone, get a wireless headset so you can walk around.
• Take breaks every 15 or so minutes to stand up and move your body a little bit.
• Take the stairs, bike/walk to work, or eliminate sitting time in any other way.
• Get regular exercise
• As the infographic points out, extra TV time is really dangerous.

Good luck, get off your butt!

The list is general in order of how I felt about them, although it gets kind of foggy later down the list.

Links take you to the artist or the track itself on my favorite music site, the Hype Machine.

The Tallest Man on Earth
His voice makes me wonder why I’ve never really listened to Bob Dylan much, as it’s probably the closest I’ve heard. I love the simplicity of a man and a guitar and how he makes it sound so good.
Top Tracks: The Gardener, Graceland (cover), King of Spain, The Wild Hunt

The Head and the Heart
A new band that is just starting to become better known as they just got signed by Sub Pop Records. I’m partial to them being from the Northwest, but they have great harmonies and are very down to earth.
Top Tracks: Down in the Valley, Rivers and Roads

Kanye West
His album was my favorite hip hop album of the year. Obviously his lyrics are inappropriate, he’s crazy, and is full of himself, but his music is good.
Top Tracks: All of the Lights, Power, Runaway, See Me Now

Vampire Weekend
Love these East Coast youngsters. Saw them live at McDonald Theater and it was a great show. Their first album was more critically acclaimed and popular than their one that came out in 2010, but there are some great songs on the 2010 album.
Top Tracks:: I Think You’re A Contra, Run, Giving Up The Gun

Stars
I’m a big fan of this French/Canadian male/female vocalists and band. Another good new album this year, and lots of good albums and songs from the past. I saw them at the Wow Hall live about two years ago and it was really enjoyable.
Top Tracks: Fixed, Dead Hearts, Wasted Daylight

Eminem
I went to the “Home and Home” Jay-Z and Eminem concert in Yankee Stadium that was simply amazing. It was my first time seeing Eminem live and usually I’m disappointed by rap artists live. Eminem was the opposite. His passion performing his new album live to go along with past hits was good to see as he bounces back from some dark times.
Top Tracks: Not Afraid, No Love, Love the Way You Lie

James Vincent McMorrow
A newer singer/songwriter that is starting to get a lot of buzz. Probably technically a 2011 artist but since I’m late in writing this he slips in.
Top Tracks: If I Had A Boat, Sparrow and the Wolf

Sufjan Stevens
Definitely a different style album from him with the Age of Adz in 2010. But his new electronic sound works on about half the songs pretty well.
Top Tracks: I Walked, Age of Adz, Too Much, Now That I’m Older

Bon Iver
More of a 2009 breakout artist with no new album this year, but I still listened to them a quite a bit in 2010. Awesome stuff that is haunting.
Top Tracks:: Re: Stacks, Blood Bank, Skinny Love, Come Talk To Me (Peter Gabriel Cover), Wolves Part I and II

Joshua Radin
Mellow singer/songwriter with some great past albums and came out with another this year that was a bit more upbeat but still good. Lots of good songs on the album.
Top Tracks: Brand New Day, Streetlight

Mat Kearney
I have to include fellow South Eugene Axemen Mat Kearney. His album City of Black and White was good and I have a feeling his next will be even better.
Top Tracks: Closer to Love

Florence and the Machine
I wouldn’t guess that I would like Florence and the Machine, but I do. Florence is a powerful female vocalist that really gets going strong. I assume “The Machine” is her band. Discuss.
Top Tracks: Cosmic Love, Dog Days are Over, You’ve Got The Love

Robyn
Experienced Swedish vocalist who has apparently been laying down solid tracks for years.
Top Tracks: Be Mine, Dancing On My Own

Ellie Goulding
I’m really going crazy on the female European vocalists, but Ellie Goulding is another good one who does a great job with covers and was a favorite of DJs to remix and mash up.
Top Tracks:Lights, Starry Eyed, Under the Sheets, Your Song (Elton John cover), Only Girl In The World (Rihanna cover), Wolves (Bon Iver cover)

The Weepies
Mellow duo who’s been putting out good albums or years. Another good album in 2010.
Top Tracks:Please Speak Well Of Me, Be My Thrill

Angus and Julie Stone
A newer find for me, but another mellow duo that’s good.
Top Tracks: Bella, Big Jet Plane, Yellow Brick Road

Chiddy Bang
Great mixtape rap artist. Some really fun tracks.
Top Tracks: Kids, All Things Go, Under the Sheets

This year is off to a good start, let’s hope 2011 delivers because 2010 was a good one.

Regardless, in all of that time it’s been working out just for the sake of being healthy and trying to not gain weight. I’ve missed having specific athletic performance and competitive goals in mind like when I was working out hard playing high school basketball.

There was always a clear mission, and the workouts had a competitive purpose.

Partially inspired by my wife completing a half-marathon last year, I’ve decided to join her in training for the Eugene half-marathon in May. It should be an interesting challenge as some bone chips in my feet have always caused enough pain to keep me limited to running 6 or so miles at once in the past.

I’ve decided to stop using that as an excuse and figure out a way around it through the right shoes, orthotics, or just fighting through the pain and complete a half-marathon.

Since I’m challenging myself professionally right now by starting up GuideMe, why not challenge myself physically as well? Any advice is appreciated!

Business Goals

1. Build a great product and foundation for GuideMe
   The biggest business focus I have is obviously GuideMe, a company I cofounded late in 2010 after leaving Yahoo!/Right Media. It’s still in the very early stages but the major business focus of this year is to build a great consumer web and mobile application that makes giving and getting recommendations a better experience than it is today. By the end of 2011 the application should be robust and we should have good user growth occurring throughout the year.
2. Less multitasking, more singletasking
   I’ve always prided myself at being “good” at multitasking. I don’t think it really was until this year that I realized that’s really not a good skill. Having 30 browser tabs open while reading two articles, working on a product spec, talking on the phone, and IMing with coworkers is not really an efficient way to do the best quality work. It also can distract me from getting the most important thing possible done as soon as possible. I’ve already started to improve at this, but I hope to really fine tune my ability to focus to get the needle-moving activities accomplished and focus better on the task at hand.
3. Blog more with higher quality
   In 2010 I only published 28 blog posts on ConversionRater, which is roughly one every two weeks. That’s not terrible, but a bunch of them were quick posts that really weren’t that great as well. I’d like to at least improve that to one blog post a week, and improve the quality of those posts. Additionally, I’m blogging over at GuideMe and would like a similar pace there. There are a few reasons for doing this, such as that in the age of Twitter and Facebook status updates there is less valuable long form writing being done, it helps me think and organize my thoughts, and I think it increases the chances of serendipitous meetings and relationships occurring by putting myself out there.

Personal Goals

1. Put the phone down
   I am guilty of being an iPhone addict who takes advantage of the ability to do work email, read tech news, or use Twitter/Facebook to see communicate and see what’s going on. While I don’t want to entirely cut off the mobile usage, I’d like to cut down my use of the phone in the presence of my wife and kids and be there in the moment interacting with them.
2. Provide my kids with new experiences
   While I don’t think this has been any sort of weakness, I want to continue to enable my kids to have new experiences. This could be traveling to new places, doing new activities they’ve never done before, taking them to music and art events, or anything else that’s beyond our normal every day activities.
3. Stop drinking soda
   This may be the hardest goal of any on the list for me. I don’t drink coffee, I very rarely drink any type of alcohol, and I’m not a fan of tea, fruit juices, or any other sort of drink. This means I’ve been an avid soda drinker for most of my adult life for both caffeine purposes as well as just to drink something besides water that is enjoyable. I’ve tried quitting before and gone on some decent soda-free stretches, but I’ve never really kicked the habit. It’s strange because I know all the reasons about why it’s not good for me, and I’ve noticed all the benefits of not drinking it when I’ve stopped for a few weeks or a month or so in the past. Why not just quit completely right?
4. Bonus: Watch Oregon win the BCS National Championship
   This one is out of my control, but on January 10th a goal that I never thought possible is within reach as my alma mater Oregon Ducks are playing Auburn in the BCS National Championship game. This would be a great goal to cross off the lifetime list. Let’s end this list with a video to support this last goal.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_P1PPy7FTo[/youtube]

And here’s the 2009 original:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hrjpe1VCNg[/youtube]

From Addicted To Quack

Sorry to mix some sports with technology talk, but one of my biggest passions starts again tomorrow with the kickoff of the Oregon Ducks football team’s 2010 season.

Last season started terribly with the horrific lost to Boise St. featuring “the punch” by LeGarrette Blount, but it ended up with a Pac-10 championship and trip to the Rose Bowl. Who knows what’s in store for 2010 although there are high hopes for the Ducks once again.

My passion for the Ducks started very early on with my parents taking me to Duck games in the 80s when Autzen Stadium was half empty and the team was terrible. We could lay down in the bleachers, play touch football in the walkways, and not really need to pay that much attention to the game as the Ducks were usually losing so bad.

That’s what’s made the last 15 years of Duck football so fun, is that the success tastes so much sweeter when you have to experience the pain. Reminds me of a startup in some ways….

[More ICanHazCheezburger Duck photos from Addicted to Quack]

This is simply my perspective as I know that others at Right Media and Yahoo! had completely different opinions and feelings about everything that occurred from 2004-2010. That being said, let’s take a walk down memory lane.

Joining Right Media

In late 2004 when my longtime friend Brian O’Kelley (currently CEO of AppNexus) reached out to me to see if I wanted to join a startup called Right Media. Brian was the CTO of Right Media and had built some interesting auction technology for their ad server. They wanted to start going more aggressively after publishers and he thought I’d be able to help with that effort.

I had a good job I enjoyed at Palo Alto Software, a Eugene-based business that is the leader in the business planning software space. I had worked there for four years and was managing a small team running their ecommerce site PaloAlto.com, as well as their main content properties Bplans.com and Mplans.com. In my spare time at night, I also was operating a site I started in 1997 called Wakeboarder.com that I later sold in 2006.

Despite the good job, I wanted the opportunity to join a younger startup and online advertising was a field that I had good experience in and was passionate about. My role was to do business development, product, and support work for medium to small publishers for Right Media’s ad network. Additionally, I looked forward to working with Brian again as we had started our first web business together in 1995 and worked together numerous times since (including a fun dot-com bomb in 1999).

Right Media was a New York company, but when I joined I made it clear I had no plans to move from Eugene. Fortunately, Brian and the rest of the executive team (Michael Walrath, CEO and Christine Hunsicker, COO) allowed me to start building a publisher-focused team in Eugene. When I joined my wife was excited for me to be able to work from home since we had recently had our 2nd child. However, after a month I had already hired three great people and found office space. It was off to the races.

Right Media Growth

When I joined, Right Media was an ad network with some interesting and differentiated auction technology that helped power the network. It had not yet become an ad exchange, but the ad network itself was growing well. I helped build Right Media’s self-service publisher signup, and we began bringing in publishers at a steady clip. it’s funny now to think back to 2005 and how we were talking to publishers like “TheFacebook.com” which was at the time a few young college kids who didn’t know much about advertising for their college social network.

Not too long after getting the office space setup in Eugene the company started making the move to the crazy concept of an ad exchange. We had to go sell other ad networks who were our competitors to use the Right Media Exchange as their ad server or as an additional place to access supply and demand. It was a strange notion to many people externally, but it made a lot of sense to everyone within the company. Even then we didn’t know what would happen when we connected our ad network to another ad network to see how the buying and selling would perform on one platform. Fortunately, it worked quite well.

The Eugene Office Entrance

The time during 2005-2007 was amazing as every month saw growth and progress in the business. The Exchange continued to grow, improve in quality, and it started making real waves within the online advertising industry. We felt like underdogs taking on the establishment to change the industry, which is one of those things that makes startups so much fun and addicting to many people.

There were problems with quality, hiccups with the exchange scaling, and problems with spyware and other issues that the company took very seriously and worked through diligently. I think those things really kept us on our toes and kept us so busy that you really couldn’t stop and marvel at the fact that we were doing billions of impressions per day by the time 2007 hit.

During 2006 though our team in Eugene had noticed that small to medium publishers were having a tough time working with the complexity of the Right Media Exchange. We used the APIs to build RMX Direct which was later renamed to Direct Media Exchange.

This product was the first self-service publisher yield optimizer that was a simple ad server that allowed publishers to get demand from the Exchange while also managing and auctioning their inventory to 3rd party ad networks like Google Adsense, Valueclick, and others. This was a forefather to the products later built by companies like Pubmatic, the Rubicon Project, and AdMeld.

Direct Media Exchange also was experiencing the same kind of rapid growth and success of the Right Media Exchange, but at a smaller scale that was a bit more under the radar. The team in Eugene was pretty proud of what we’d built together.

Pre-Acquisition

My first personal experience with Yahoo! directly came in 2006 during Ad Tech San Francisco. At about 10 am on the first day, Brian told me that he had a meeting scheduled with Yahoo! down in Sunnyvale that afternoon that he could no longer make due to an important meeting at Ad Tech. He suggested I go along with Ant Taylor and Kees Schouten who were both at Ad Tech as well. What was interesting about this was that Ant and Kees were actually in their first week on the job at Right Media and didn’t even really know what their roles were yet. Additionally, I had no context for the meeting besides that “we are talking to Yahoo! about becoming a client.”

We headed down to Sunnyvale and met with Ryan Christensen, who was doing Pricing and Yield Management for Yahoo!’s display business. We managed to get through the meeting even though we lacked context and really spent most of the time learning about how Yahoo! was currently running their non-guaranteed business and talking about how Right Media’s Exchange could help with some of those problems.

Later that summer I was in New York when a group from Yahoo! came to meet with the Right Media executive team. The morning of the meeting, Ant and I were tasked with building a presentation for one portion of the meeting. As a great example of the hectic pace of the startup world, we again lacked context and tried to scrap our way through it anyway. As you’d expect, we created a terrible presentation that wasn’t usable for the meeting. The meeting apparently went well, but the panic I felt that morning was something I’ll never forget.

In October of of 2006 things really started to get more real as Yahoo! invested $40 million into Right Media for 20% of the company and to become a major client of the Exchange. This was a huge win both from a company stability perspective financially, but it also provided a marquee quality client who validated the Exchange in the eyes of the industry.

Of course, there were feelings internally and rumors abound through the rest of 2006 and early 2007 that Yahoo! might want the whole company. As visitors from Yahoo! became more frequent to the offices in 2007, it was a not so subtle secret they were doing due diligence and diving deeper on our technology.

After spending Monday through Thursday at a conference my flighted landed in Eugene and I received a call from Christine Hunsicker our COO. She said I needed to be in New York by 9:00 am the following morning to demo Direct Media Exchange to people from Yahoo! and to bring along our lead product manager and lead engineer for the product. I told her this would be tough as I hadn’t been home all week and it was already Thursday afternoon. She said she wasn’t asking if I could do it or not, so we drove the two hours to Portland to take a red eye to New York.

We flew all night, changed in the bathroom at JFK, and then made it to the Right Media offices a bit late. The three of us walked into the main Right Media conference room where there was a few Right Media executives and then a number of executives from Yahoo!. At the time I wasn’t familiar with any of the Yahoo! executives as it was my first time meeting them, but it was a pretty high-powered tech crowd in the room consisting of SVP of Product Mark Morrissey, SVP of Engineering David Ku, Chief Scientist Qi Lu (now the President of Online Services at Microsoft), VP of Product John Slade, and halfway through the meeting Jerry Yang also made an appearance.

We were asked to demo Direct Media Exchange so we connected our product manager’s laptop to the projector. Remember, this was after a night of travel and no sleep. As the demo begins, the first thing everyone notices is his Firefox toolbar is set to Google as the default search engine. Oops, strike one!

After some half-joking and half-serious comments about the toolbar, I gave an introduction to the product and ask our product manager to login to the application. He then clicked on the username form field and hesitated. I wasn’t sure why he was doing so, but he gave me a look that let me know something was wrong. I urged him to proceed, and he typed in a Gmail address to login to the application. Apparently it was the only address he had with administrative priviledges. Oops, strike two!

We endured some more jokes that were increasingly serious, but then continued to give a quality demo of the application with plenty of good dialog. I thought we’d moved past the early mistakes when we were asked whether we were building a specific future enhancement. Our product manager responded “Absolutely, I’ve already created some mockups I can show you.” I wanted to bang my head on the desk at that point, as I knew what was coming and he opened up mockups that he’d recently created in MS Paint. That’s right, they were screenshots of our app with hand-drawn new features scribbled on it. A true professional mockup! Strike three?

Fortunately, the strength of what we’d built and the traction we’d achieved with Direct Media Exchange in the demo was what ended up hopefully being memorable. The company overall ended up being a compelling option for Yahoo! after Google had just ponied up $3.1 billion for DoubleClick just a few weeks earlier. Yahoo! purchased the remaining 80% of Right Media it didn’t already own for $680M making it one of the largest ad technology acquisitions of all time.

The Acquisition

Getting acquired is an extremely interesting experience. Of course the team celebrated, as it was a large acquisition and it really validates what you’ve been working so hard on. This was the goal right? Or at least one of the big goals?

On one hand you are happy knowing that your company’s stock is now liquid, and you have the hope of the business becoming even bigger and achieving more success with the “endless” resources of the acquiring company. It was also exciting to go work for one of the pioneers of the web who had big businesses in so many areas online.

However, even having never been through an acquisition, I knew many things were going to change. Immediately the people in our Eugene office began to wonder what would happen to them and if our Eugene office would be closed. At this point we had over 30 employees in our Eugene office but people wondered if they’d have new managers, if they’d be laid off, and what would happen to the products they were working on.

The acquisition process and integration itself for me personally was good. It could have been improved probably with more structured education on Yahoo!’s businesses and such, but I felt very welcomed by employees at Yahoo!, and got to immediately start spending time in various Yahoo! offices teaching people about Right Media and what we did.

On my first trip to the Burbank office a group of employees I had just met invited me with them to an Anaheim Might Ducks playoff hockey game. It was a good experience to get to know them personally and see my first live hockey game at the same time.

Moving to their IT systems and and way of working was also pretty easy, but there were still challenging questions the companies had to work through. What would happen to the Right Media brand? Do we integrate websites? What do we switch to Yahoo! technology and what don’t we? Can we still use Google Analytics to track our sites? Most of these things got resolved over time without too much trouble.

Post-Acquisition

After the honeymoon period was over more challenges began to pop up. Specifically, there were strategic questions that showed everyone was not perfectly aligned on where everything was headed and how it should be built. Should we build on top of the existing Right Media technology? Should we start and build a new ad platform from scratch that has the functionality of Right Media combined with the guaranteed ad serving system Yahoo! had built in house?

After the decision was made to build a new platform from scratch (APT) there were then issues trying to keep building Right Media Exchange functionality as many engineers had been moved to work on the new project. Additionally, many engineers had to work on scaling Right Media itself with all of Yahoo!’s added volume and integrating with Yahoo!’s finance systems. This left little room in the road map to keep pushing Right Media as hard as many of us had hoped.

Despite this, there was a lot of excitement over the new system being built and the strategies to do some amazing thing in the display advertising space.

Personally, I had been promoted and was excited about taking on responsibilities at Yahoo! that also went outside of Right Media. It was interesting to learn about new areas of Yahoo!’s business and work with so many new people within the company. I’ve heard other acquisition stories where people from acquired companies were buried in the bigger organization and not given prominent roles. Yahoo! definitely gave various people at Right Media strong roles within the company, although there are definitely people who did get stuck in unfortunate situations.

Microsoft Acquisition Attempt

Not too long after getting settled in at Yahoo!, Terry Semel was replaced with Jerry Yang as the CEO and Microsoft went public with their acquisition offer. This was a very interesting time to say the least. It was a rapid ascent to being a startup striving for attention every day to having Yahoo! on every news site all day long with rumors and speculation about the Microsoft acquisition. People tried to not make it a distraction, but I think everyone would be lying if they said there wasn’t a lot of time spent reading that speculation online every day and talking casually around the offices about the situation. For the most part it seemed like most projects kept their momentum as everyone knew that it was a long way from happening for sure.

Everyone I talked to internally loved the idea of locking in a stock price in the $30s, but no one was very excited about having to integrate two companies of that size with different cultures and missions. I felt the same way, and was wondering what would happen to Right Media in the situation of an acquisition.

Of course, it all fell apart. It was followed by the attempted search deal with Google and it ended Jerry’s time at CEO. In retrospect based on the stock price alone you’d have to classify that it was a mistake for Yahoo! to not take one of the Microsoft offers. However, Yahoo! is still a profitable independent company today which I’d say is better for the overall health of the web than if the acquisition had been successful.

Besides the Microsoft acquisition, Yahoo!’s display strategy was also affected by the economy going into the recession. A lot of the ideas around building guaranteed cross-selling relationships for display didn’t make a ton of sense when every publisher was struggling to sell their own inventory alone. This turned a lot of the development of the APT platform to be on building it internally for Yahoo! while continuing to support the Newspaper Consortium who was using the product to run their display ad businesses and sell Yahoo!’s inventory to local advertisers.

The soured economy led to two rounds of layoffs as well. Laying off members of my team and seeing former Right Media employees in Eugene was definitely the lowest point at Yahoo!. Some of the decisions on who to layoff just didn’t seem to make any sense, although struggling to figure it out has never gotten me anywhere. That being said, the company definitely felt overstaffed to me at the time, so it seemed like layoffs did make sense for Yahoo! overall.

The New Yahoo!

After all that drama, Carol Bartz was brought in as CEO and began to make changes throughout the company. Carol did a nice job shutting down certain products and businesses, selling some pieces of Yahoo!, and the change brought some executive turnover and org structure changes.

Unfortunately, one of those products that got shuttered was Direct Media Exchange. While it was sad for our team in Eugene who built it, the reality was that the code hadn’t been touched since the Right Media acquisition. The product had continued to grow and was doing over 20 billion impressions a month and was easily profitable since there was only a small team doing customer support for it. I was a believer though in the company’s mission to focus, and smaller publishers were not a priority of the company as also demonstrated by the shutting down of the Yahoo! Publisher Network product for small publishers.

The major area though that Carol “outsourced” was the search technology business to Microsoft. This became a huge strategic focus for the company and I took the opportunity to move completely out of the Exchange area into B2B Marketing to run the marketing for the Search Alliance with Microsoft. It was a nice change of pace to work on search, work with Microsoft directly, and to work with a new group within Yahoo!.

During this period our office in Eugene was closed as our lease ran out and we were down from 30+ employees to 7 after the two rounds of layoffs, people moving to other Yahoo! offices, or leaving for other job opportunities altogether.

It became clear to me over this time though that I was getting the entrepreneurial itch again and I wanted to get back to building products. One of nice things about a big company is there are specialists to perform almost every task, but I felt more and more like I spent my whole day just talking to people internally while doing status reports and internal presentations. While there is some value in that, it feels like I was disconnected from products and customers. I could have explored moving into other parts of Yahoo!, but I really wanted to start a company and get back to being an entrepreneur.

Overall

The bottom line was the whole thing was a positive experience for me. I’m glad Brian initially recruited me into it and that the Right Media executive team was supportive of building a presence in Eugene.

It’s interesting though is how perspectives can differ, because I know some people at Right Media felt the acquisition was a very negative experience for them. For me though it was positive to have Right Media stock become liquid, I was exposed to many things I never would have learned in a startup or small company, and I got to have front row seats to some very interesting things happening in technology. The best part really may have been many of the friends I made along the way, many of whom I’m sure I’ll work with again. Not a bad way at all to spend the early part of my 30s.

I wish the ending would have turned out different for Direct Media Exchange, and I wish the momentum of the Right Media Exchange wouldn’t have slowed down. As I was leaving Yahoo! though, it appeared that more emphasis was being put back on that business so hopefully that continues that way.

The Hype Machine is a great way to find new and rare music on specific artists you may already like and what music bloggers are saying about them, but it’s also a great way to find new music by going to the popular page. I mentioned this on Twitter yesterday and Fred Wilson picked up my quote for his post today that refers to the Hype Machine as the Rolling Stone of our time. Those are strong words, but I can tell you that I visit Hype Machine daily whenever I’m working on documents for work or just surfing the web, and I can’t remember the last time I picked up a Rolling Stone magazine or visited their site.

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